I am going to start out by answering Veronica's question:

What concentration is the ethanol that the mice are drinking? My obvious concern is that you could lose some to evaporation over time and it may appear as though the animal had been drinking it, or that it'll evaporate and decrease the concentration of what they actually do drink. The mice drink 15% ethanol in water for 2 hours each day (besides weekends). This is called "2 bottle choice limited access." They start drinking 30 minutes before their dark cycle at 11:00am. Because water and ethanol form an azeotrope there is less evaporation than if they were drinking 100% ethanol. We refill the bottles every 2-3 days and they only get it for two hours each day so there is very little evaporation. On top of which, the interface that is exposed to the atmosphere is very small and the bottles are stored on their sides so any evaporation would go into the headspace. This is fixed by just shaking the bottles before giving them to the mice.

On the topic of evaporation, Chris decided to try out a little experiment to show me the difference that interface with atmosphere can make. We filled both a beaker and an erlenmeyer flask with 20mL of ethanol and put it under a hood. On Monday hopefully all of the ethanol in the beaker will have evaporated while there will still be some in the erlenmeyer flask.

We had a lot of free time today so Chris lectured/had me read a book on Heisenberg's Principle and Schrodingers wave equation regarding multiple world interpretation of quantam mechanics. Here is what I remember: there are infinite universes, everything is true because anything is possible, there are infinite copies of yourself, you always succeed (and you also always fail) because anytime something can happen it will happen, and time-space is NOT linear.

Like we do everyday, we noted how much the mice have drunk and put it into a fun graph. Control is red and MW is blue. Below you can see the emerging divergence between the two groups now and the difference between each group and its original baseline drinking.

And of course, what you've all been waiting for:

The thing on it's head is the headmount of course.